They haven't even actually made the nanoparticles yet, so lets see that and a manufacture process that only has reusable reagents before we get too excited.
Breathing long spiky mineral bits seems extra bad for you. They might get you a head start on warming the planet, but there's a lot of order stuff you have to do anyway before Mars is remotely viable, and these spiky particles will then be lying on the ground forever. Is that worth it?
Using natural reproduction you're correct. Never say never, though: we could massively boost the birthrate and the population by turning to artificial methods. Aldous Huxley's visionary utopian novel "Brave New World" discussed how this could be done back in 1935. Once we develop the technology to make "artificial wombs", we won't need natural reproduction any more and can create as many new people as we want.
Is there any conceivable advantage to overstuffing the planet with an excess of population, particularly when they'll need to be supported with supply pipelines so well crafted there's no margin of error that doesn't kill a few million (less than 1 percent!!).
I get the techno sci fi "because we can" argument, where's the grounded rationale?
In today's world, you wouldn't want an increasing population unless you're very short-sighted. You might, however, want an artificial boost to the birthrate just to maintain a constant population. Growing populations are good for the economy, but bad for the environment. Shrinking populations are really bad for the economy. But a stable population might be a good compromise that economies and social systems can adapt to.
However, looking into the much farther future, where we've perfected offworld habitats such as O'Neal cylinders that can hold millions of people, we would need to expand as a species, not shrink to the size of a small city, which is the natural result if birthrates stay as they are now.
Of course, it might not come to this at all: perhaps we'll perfect anti-aging technologies (so greatly reducing the death rate), and technology to allow people to have kids at almost any age instead of needing to do it before they're 40.
> However, looking into the much farther future, where we've perfected offworld habitats such as O'Neal cylinders that can hold millions of people
Why would we need a hundred billion on Earth?
> we would need to expand as a species,
Why?
> not shrink to the size of a small city, which is the natural result if birthrates stay as they are now.
Why would birthrates stay as they are? Why not a typical population cycle for an constrained with population expanding, peaking, falling somewhat, and then expanding again ?
Saying "we need to" and "would have to" does not in any way address the "why" of the question asked, it's merely restating a belief that "that's the way things should(?) go".
>> However, looking into the much farther future, where we've perfected offworld habitats such as O'Neal cylinders that can hold millions of people
>Why would we need a hundred billion on Earth?
When did I ever say anything about having a hundred billion (or any number) on Earth?
>> we would need to expand as a species,
>Why?
It's human nature to expand. Besides, more people means more art, more science, more innovation, etc. And of course an expanding economy. Plus what if something really bad happens? Having more people scattered around is more insurance against extinction. If something awful happens on Earth, having billions in space means humanity will continue.
>Why would birthrates stay as they are?
Birthrates are continuously falling, in case you haven't noticed. They're not going to stay the same as they are now, they're going to decrease even more.
>Why not a typical population cycle for an constrained with population expanding, peaking, falling somewhat, and then expanding again ?
Why would birthrates increase? Every single piece of data we have has shown that when women have choice and agency and people have access to contraception, birthrates fall. So for birthrates to increase, we either have to make women into slaves (I don't support this), or we need another solution.
"Is there any conceivable advantage to overstuffing the planet with an excess of population" in the context of sabbaticaldev stating:
> when we have 100billion people on earth it will be inevitable
and you responded. The context of excess population on the planet was already given.
> Birthrates are continuously falling, in case you haven't noticed.
They are, for now, I've been aware of that for 20 years and cheering it along.
> They're not going to stay the same as they are now, they're going to decrease even more.
Again, why? The normal expectation in biology in resource constrained populations is boom | bust cycles and it's entirely reasonable to think that birth rates will pick up when back pressure decreases.
No, you're just trying to push your own agenda and are arguing in bad faith. I responded to your question "why?", saying that we wouldn't want to in today's world. I only discussed increasing population in a possible far future with offworld colonies, and you willfully ignored that part.
>Again, why? The normal expectation in biology in resource constrained populations is boom | bust cycles and it's entirely reasonable to think that birth rates will pick up when back pressure decreases.
I already answered this question. Why would women want to have 10 kids if they don't have to? Obviously, you're not a woman and haven't spent much time around any.
The biggest benefits from artificial gestation are mass and life support.
It's a helluva lot easier to accelerate and provide life support to frozen embryos than it is an adult human.
Without radical propulsion breakthroughs, there are severe mass limits on what we'd be able to send to nearby star systems in a reasonable amount of time.
There's no way it would work out economically: compared to Mars, it would be literally cheaper to build every one of these 100 billion people a US style suburban house with all the power, water, and sewage connected. Probably by an order of magnitude or two.
No, Americans can't handle wearing a mask without losing their minds. Over here in Japan, people wear masks all the time (normally when they're sick, or have hay fever); it's no big deal.
The more I think about a human future in space the more I wonder whether settling space itself is a better idea than trying to settle a planet.
None of them are habitable. All of them have too little gravity for us. So build factories on the Moon, which has only 1/6 gravity, and use those to build huge stations with rotational gravity that we can launch from the Moon (with its low gravity) and live in those. Use ion engines or solar sails to slowly push them around the solar system if we want.
Eventually the Lunar and asteroid-based mining and factories would be mostly robotic. We would live in things that look like the giant stations in The Expanse or O'Neill Cylinders.
Life support on such a station is not substantially harder than it would be on the surface of the Moon or Mars. It could be easier due to the absence of things like nasty abrasive dust, storms, etc.
Over millennia eventually our solar system ends up with something like a living/inhabited Dyson swarm. We become actually spacefaring, not just living on another planet.
> more I think about a human future in space the more I wonder whether settling space itself is a better idea than trying to settle a planet
It's explored in A City on Mars [1]. It's technologically more remote than planetary habitation.
Mars gives you some gravity, some pressure, some protection from radiation (less from the atmosphere than from the planet) and asteroids and plenty of ISRUs, from water to CO2 to dry mass. With a space station you have to do all of that yourself.
Mars gives you ~1/3g, which might be enough for humans but we don't know. A spin station can give you up to 1g if it's big enough. The difference between air pressure on Mars and hard vacuum is not that large. The radiation point is valid but we don't really know the real world long-term biological effects and limits and it's something we need to learn before we try any of this. All forms of radiation aren't created equal.
The easy availability of raw materials right on the surface is probably the biggest thing a planetary body has going for it over living in space, but if you can launch stuff from the Moon with a rail gun then shipping water, CO2, etc. up from there isn't going to be that hard.
As for A City on Mars I'm generally not a fan of popular science "it'll never work" books.
They're always popular because negativity sells and is an easy way to sound smart. Being negative and wrong tends to be forgotten, see Paul Ehrlich for one well known example. Being positive or optimistic and wrong is something you'll never live down. Humans have a powerful pervasive negativity bias.
I must admit that I haven’t and am going on reviews, summaries, and reactions, all of which seem to paint that picture. Maybe I should give it a read. It’s entirely possible that people are just not understanding it.
It could be argued that the early days of climate change made the most-inhabited parts of the world more livable by making winters less harsh.
That said, I was mostly trying to draw attention to "once it's easy to terraform earth" being nonsense. We have the demonstrated ability to alter the Earth's climate.
I'm honestly getting tired of these "terraforming mars" articles, anyone that's seriously looked into it knows it is not possible to change the surface such that humans can live outside. The gravity of the planet is so low that it couldn't even give you enough density with a 100% oxygen atmosphere to breathe it and live, you'd be hypoxic. And with the other things required in the atmosphere to have an earth like biome, forget about it. I have seen articles talking about using argon as a buffer gas (so we can forget about the nitrogen cycle) and all sorts of other stuff that any serious person that knows the basic details knows is just popsci candy on the order of ancient aliens.
It's pretty simple: if life were viable at that location it would already be there. I can see sustaining an artificial environment there, like a fabric covering a greenhouse like area or nuclear reactors powering caves complete with agriculture, but these aren't "terraforming".
> it is not possible to change the surface such that humans can live outside
Is that the stated goal? Adjusting temperature would make e.g. agriculture much easier. (It also puts us in a more-familiar domain of materials science.)
> if life were viable at that location it would already be there
There's certainly no sciernce that demonstrates that human life is viable on the surface of mars.
Outsidfe of atmosperic gases, there is the issue of no vanallen belt, and thus no protection from the solar wind.
Cellular damage has been demonstrated in every astronaut that has ever stayed on teh space station. Mars willbe the same. The surface is unihabitable.
I've been saying for years: anyone who wants to know what it will be like to live on Mars should bury a cargo container in their back yard, and live in it for a year.
Teraforming Nevada would be much more successful. But apparently even that's not on the table, as Earth destroying human behaviour has only accelerated since the Kyoto accords.
>Cellular damage has been demonstrated in every astronaut that has ever stayed on teh space station.
Yep, I really feel sorry for the poor suckers who flew up to the ISS on that p-o-s Boeing Starliner. They thought they'd only be up there for 8 days, not enough for significant physical problems to develop. Instead, it's now been 2 months, and they're now saying they might be stuck there until February!
> no sciernce that demonstrates that human life is viable on the surface of mars
Nobody claimed as much. You said "if life were viable [on Mars] it would already be there." To the degree we have science around this question, it seems to support the notion that transplanted Earth life could survive on Mars [1][2].
> Cellular damage has been demonstrated in every astronaut that has ever stayed on teh space station. Mars willbe the same. The surface is unihabitable.
Cellular damage has been detected in every person who has ever been tested because that's how multicellular life works.
You're not wrong about space being harsh. But you're again getting ahead of the science. We don't have real data on how human bodies work in partial gravity and partially-shielded extraterrestrial radiation environments. Anyone saying conclusively that Mars (or LEO or the Moon) is long-term habitable or uninhabitable is not speaking to the science.
Mars is ~2x the distance from the sun as earth, which means about a quarter of the sun's energy reaches the surface there as does here. I don't think agriculture outside there is very viable with or without a thick atmosphere or a warmer environment, there simply isn't enough energy hitting the leaves of the plants for them to survive.
But even then, I would think yes, the purpose of transforming a planet to be earth like enough to support earth life would include allowing for people to go outside on the surface.
Youre right that statement isn't falsifiable, but from my perspective, everywhere that we know life is possible it exists, it's not a stretch to draw that conclusion.
Even if it made the surface of Mars more conducive for a while for radiation hardened plants, without a guaranteed magnetic field having the evaporated water (hydrogen) get carried away by the solar wind seems like a bigger issue.
52 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 95.8 ms ] threadI mean, yes. Sometimes. Wrap this rock in a wire and you’ll have a radio is not exactly what you’d expect.
Closer to home, making cars self-driving, and making actually useful pedestrian robots are good examples of "easier than we thought" too.
It's a tongue-in-cheek description of a crystal radio [1].
If anything, most technology is developed before we understand how it works. Theory driving application is a somewhat recent phenomenon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Using natural reproduction you're correct. Never say never, though: we could massively boost the birthrate and the population by turning to artificial methods. Aldous Huxley's visionary utopian novel "Brave New World" discussed how this could be done back in 1935. Once we develop the technology to make "artificial wombs", we won't need natural reproduction any more and can create as many new people as we want.
Is there any conceivable advantage to overstuffing the planet with an excess of population, particularly when they'll need to be supported with supply pipelines so well crafted there's no margin of error that doesn't kill a few million (less than 1 percent!!).
I get the techno sci fi "because we can" argument, where's the grounded rationale?
The only reason I can come up with is a dictator raising an army. In that sense, a human is a cheaper drone.
However, looking into the much farther future, where we've perfected offworld habitats such as O'Neal cylinders that can hold millions of people, we would need to expand as a species, not shrink to the size of a small city, which is the natural result if birthrates stay as they are now.
Of course, it might not come to this at all: perhaps we'll perfect anti-aging technologies (so greatly reducing the death rate), and technology to allow people to have kids at almost any age instead of needing to do it before they're 40.
Why would we need a hundred billion on Earth?
> we would need to expand as a species,
Why?
> not shrink to the size of a small city, which is the natural result if birthrates stay as they are now.
Why would birthrates stay as they are? Why not a typical population cycle for an constrained with population expanding, peaking, falling somewhat, and then expanding again ?
Saying "we need to" and "would have to" does not in any way address the "why" of the question asked, it's merely restating a belief that "that's the way things should(?) go".
When did I ever say anything about having a hundred billion (or any number) on Earth?
>> we would need to expand as a species, >Why?
It's human nature to expand. Besides, more people means more art, more science, more innovation, etc. And of course an expanding economy. Plus what if something really bad happens? Having more people scattered around is more insurance against extinction. If something awful happens on Earth, having billions in space means humanity will continue.
>Why would birthrates stay as they are?
Birthrates are continuously falling, in case you haven't noticed. They're not going to stay the same as they are now, they're going to decrease even more.
>Why not a typical population cycle for an constrained with population expanding, peaking, falling somewhat, and then expanding again ?
Why would birthrates increase? Every single piece of data we have has shown that when women have choice and agency and people have access to contraception, birthrates fall. So for birthrates to increase, we either have to make women into slaves (I don't support this), or we need another solution.
"Is there any conceivable advantage to overstuffing the planet with an excess of population" in the context of sabbaticaldev stating:
> when we have 100billion people on earth it will be inevitable
and you responded. The context of excess population on the planet was already given.
> Birthrates are continuously falling, in case you haven't noticed.
They are, for now, I've been aware of that for 20 years and cheering it along.
> They're not going to stay the same as they are now, they're going to decrease even more.
Again, why? The normal expectation in biology in resource constrained populations is boom | bust cycles and it's entirely reasonable to think that birth rates will pick up when back pressure decreases.
>Again, why? The normal expectation in biology in resource constrained populations is boom | bust cycles and it's entirely reasonable to think that birth rates will pick up when back pressure decreases.
I already answered this question. Why would women want to have 10 kids if they don't have to? Obviously, you're not a woman and haven't spent much time around any.
It's a helluva lot easier to accelerate and provide life support to frozen embryos than it is an adult human.
Without radical propulsion breakthroughs, there are severe mass limits on what we'd be able to send to nearby star systems in a reasonable amount of time.
Artificial gestation technology changes that.
I'd be okay with wearing a respirator all day long if I'm living on Mars.
There is zero overlap between people who can't wear a mask and people we'd even consider sending to Mars.
Mars' surface is covered in fine silicates [1] and other goodies (e.g. cadmium, arsenic and perchlorates [2]).
[1] https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2024/pdf/1333.pdf
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04910-3
None of them are habitable. All of them have too little gravity for us. So build factories on the Moon, which has only 1/6 gravity, and use those to build huge stations with rotational gravity that we can launch from the Moon (with its low gravity) and live in those. Use ion engines or solar sails to slowly push them around the solar system if we want.
Eventually the Lunar and asteroid-based mining and factories would be mostly robotic. We would live in things that look like the giant stations in The Expanse or O'Neill Cylinders.
Life support on such a station is not substantially harder than it would be on the surface of the Moon or Mars. It could be easier due to the absence of things like nasty abrasive dust, storms, etc.
Over millennia eventually our solar system ends up with something like a living/inhabited Dyson swarm. We become actually spacefaring, not just living on another planet.
It's explored in A City on Mars [1]. It's technologically more remote than planetary habitation.
Mars gives you some gravity, some pressure, some protection from radiation (less from the atmosphere than from the planet) and asteroids and plenty of ISRUs, from water to CO2 to dry mass. With a space station you have to do all of that yourself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars
The easy availability of raw materials right on the surface is probably the biggest thing a planetary body has going for it over living in space, but if you can launch stuff from the Moon with a rail gun then shipping water, CO2, etc. up from there isn't going to be that hard.
As for A City on Mars I'm generally not a fan of popular science "it'll never work" books.
https://dsimanek.vialattea.net/neverwrk.htm
They're always popular because negativity sells and is an easy way to sound smart. Being negative and wrong tends to be forgotten, see Paul Ehrlich for one well known example. Being positive or optimistic and wrong is something you'll never live down. Humans have a powerful pervasive negativity bias.
Have you read it? That's not the authors' conclusion.
What do you think anthropogenic climate change is?
It could be argued that the early days of climate change made the most-inhabited parts of the world more livable by making winters less harsh.
That said, I was mostly trying to draw attention to "once it's easy to terraform earth" being nonsense. We have the demonstrated ability to alter the Earth's climate.
According to whom?
In any case, the Montreal Convention fits the bill [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
It's pretty simple: if life were viable at that location it would already be there. I can see sustaining an artificial environment there, like a fabric covering a greenhouse like area or nuclear reactors powering caves complete with agriculture, but these aren't "terraforming".
Is that the stated goal? Adjusting temperature would make e.g. agriculture much easier. (It also puts us in a more-familiar domain of materials science.)
> if life were viable at that location it would already be there
There is no science to support this hypothesis.
Outsidfe of atmosperic gases, there is the issue of no vanallen belt, and thus no protection from the solar wind.
Cellular damage has been demonstrated in every astronaut that has ever stayed on teh space station. Mars willbe the same. The surface is unihabitable.
I've been saying for years: anyone who wants to know what it will be like to live on Mars should bury a cargo container in their back yard, and live in it for a year.
Teraforming Nevada would be much more successful. But apparently even that's not on the table, as Earth destroying human behaviour has only accelerated since the Kyoto accords.
Yep, I really feel sorry for the poor suckers who flew up to the ISS on that p-o-s Boeing Starliner. They thought they'd only be up there for 8 days, not enough for significant physical problems to develop. Instead, it's now been 2 months, and they're now saying they might be stuck there until February!
Nobody claimed as much. You said "if life were viable [on Mars] it would already be there." To the degree we have science around this question, it seems to support the notion that transplanted Earth life could survive on Mars [1][2].
> Cellular damage has been demonstrated in every astronaut that has ever stayed on teh space station. Mars willbe the same. The surface is unihabitable.
Cellular damage has been detected in every person who has ever been tested because that's how multicellular life works.
You're not wrong about space being harsh. But you're again getting ahead of the science. We don't have real data on how human bodies work in partial gravity and partially-shielded extraterrestrial radiation environments. Anyone saying conclusively that Mars (or LEO or the Moon) is long-term habitable or uninhabitable is not speaking to the science.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-designer-plants-on-ma...
[2] https://www.sciencealert.com/this-plant-is-so-extreme-scient...
But even then, I would think yes, the purpose of transforming a planet to be earth like enough to support earth life would include allowing for people to go outside on the surface.
Youre right that statement isn't falsifiable, but from my perspective, everywhere that we know life is possible it exists, it's not a stretch to draw that conclusion.
This would be a problem that manifests on time scales orders of magnitudes longer than human civilisation has existed.